1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to personalizing the layout of advertisements that are displayed on the results pages of search engines.
2. Art Background
Balancing monetization and user experience of search result pages (SRPs) is an active area of research in commercial search engines that serve sponsored listings (text based ads and potentially graphical ads) alongside organic (also called algorithmic or native) search results. Several leading commercial search engines typically display sponsored listings on any of three physical locations on the search results page, in conjunction with the organic results. The three locations are labeled as North, East, and South which are situated at the top, right-hand side and bottom (respectively) of the search results page.
Eye-tracking studies have identified geographic regions on search results pages as focal points or “hotspots” for users. These are regions that get more than an ordinate amount of visual attention when a user is initially presented with an HTML page filled with search related content. One of the hotspots is in the top-center of the page, which is where the human eyeball tends to focus on before processing the remainder of the document. This North region is usually the location of an ad banner, and therefore it merits extra attention in terms of what content should be placed at that position.
The North region is typically a major source of revenue for a search engine, primarily due to the extra visual attention that the sponsored listings receive from users, which translates directly into additional mouse clicks on these advertisements. Most search marketing business models are based on CPC (cost-per-click), so the mouse clicks translate directly into revenue.
However, the North region can also be a major contributor to a negative user experience. The higher the number of north sponsored listings, the more negative the user experience is likely to be especially if the ads are deemed irrelevant by the user. The negative user experience can be measured by explicitly by surveying users to gauge their satisfaction or implicitly using query abandonment rates, time-to-first-click, user return rate, as well as several other proxy metrics.
Current methods for determining advertising layout, the number of listings in each viable location, use query-based features, such as the words in the query, the number of advertisers bidding on the query, the quality of matching between the query text and advertisement description, etc. While query-based approaches solve the basic problem, they do not take into account the user who has issued the query.